Nearby terms:

bracket abstraction

An algorithm which turns a term into a function
of some variable. The result of using bracket abstraction on
T with respect to variable v, written as [v]T, is a term
containing no occurrences of v and denoting a function f such
that f v = T. This defines the function f = (\ v . T). Using
bracket abstraction and currying we can define a language
without bound variables in which the only operation is
monadic function application.

Nearby terms:

braille

/breyl/ (Often capitalised) A class of
writing systems, intended for use by blind and low-vision
users, which express glyphs as raised dots. Currently
employed braille standards use eight dots per cell, where a
cell is a glyph-space two dots across by four dots high; most
glyphs use only the top six dots.

Braille was developed by Louis Braille (pronounced /looy
bray/) in France in the 1820s. Braille systems for most
languages can be fairly trivially converted to and from the
usual script.

Braille has several totally coincidental parallels with
digital computing: it is binary, it is based on groups of
eight bits/dots and its development began in the 1820s, at the
same time Charles Babbage proposed the Difference Engine.

Nearby terms:

braille display

(Or "refreshable braille display", "refreshable
display") An electromechanical device that renders braille
with tiny, independently controlled pins used to represent the
state of dots in braille cells. Each pin, in its "on" state,
raises above the top of its hole in the screen; in its "off"
state, it drops below the top of its hole. Older systems used
tiny solenoids to control the state of the pins; modern
systems are piezoelectric.

Typical dimensions of a braille display are 1 line of 40
cells, each cell of two-by-eight dots.

brain-damaged

There is an implication that the person responsible must have
suffered brain damage, because he should have known better.
Calling something brain-damaged is really bad; it also implies
it is unusable, and that its failure to work is due to poor
design rather than some accident. "Only six monocase
characters per file name? Now *that's* brain-damaged!"

2. [especially in the Mac world] May refer to free
demonstration software that has been deliberately crippled in
some way so as not to compete with the commercial product it
is intended to sell. Synonym crippleware.

Nearby terms:

brain dump

(The act of telling someone) everything one knows about a
particular topic. Typically used when someone is going to let
a new party maintain a piece of code. Conceptually analogous
to an operating system core dump in that it saves a lot of
useful state before an exit. "You'll have to give me a
brain dump on FOOBAR before you start your new job at
HackerCorp." At Sun, this is also known as "TOI" (transfer of
information).

A Brainfuck program has a pointer that moves within an array
of 30000 bytes, initially all set to zero. The pointer
initially points to the beginning of this array. The language
has eight commands, each of which is represented as a single
character, and which can be expressed in terms of C as
follows:

Branch and Hang

Later some real examples were discovered. The Texas
InstrumentsTI-980 allowed all addressing modes with all
instructions, including Store Immediate Extended (stores the
value into the extension word of the instruction) and Branch
and Link Immediate (makes a subroutine call to the same
instruction -- Branch and Hang).

branch prediction

When a branch instruction is executed, its address and that of
the next instruction executed (the chosen destination of the
branch) are stored in the Branch Target Buffer. This
information is used to predict which way the instruction will
branch the next time it is executed so that instruction
prefetch can continue. When the prediction is correct (and it
is over 90% of the time), executing a branch does not cause a
pipeline break.

Some later CPUs simply prefetch both paths instead of trying
to predict which way the branch will go.